Tuesday, February 14, 2012

A look back suggests a sobering future of wildfire dangers in US west

EurekAlert: The American West has seen a recent increase in large wildfires due to droughts, the build-up of combustible fuel, or biomass, in forests, a spread of fire-prone species and increased tree mortality from insects and heat. In a paper appearing online Feb. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a 12-member research team warns that these conditions may be "a perfect storm" for more fires.

While grazing and fire suppression have kept incidents of wildfires unusually low for most of the last century, the amounts of combustible biomass, temperatures and drought are all rising. "Consequently, a fire deficit now exists and has been growing throughout the 20th century, pushing fire regimes into disequilibrium with climate," the team concludes.

"The last two centuries have seen dramatic changes in wildfire across the American West, with a peak in wildfires in the 1800s giving way to much less burning over the past 100 years," said lead author Jennifer R. Marlon, now a National Science Foundation Earth Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "The decline was mostly caused by the influx of explorers and settlers and by their subsequent suppression of wildfires, both intentionally and accidentally."

...In their analysis, Marlon and colleagues used existing records on charcoal deposits in lakebed sediments to establish a baseline of fire activity for the past 3,000 years. They compared that with independent fire-history data drawn from historical records and fire scars on the landscape.

..."We can use the relationship between climate and fire," Marlon said, "to answer the question: What would the natural level of fire be like today if we didn't work so hard to suppress or eliminate fires? The answer is that because of climate change and the buildup of fuels across the western U.S., levels of burning would be higher than at any time over the past 3,000 years, including the peak in burning during the Medieval Climate Anomaly."...

June 2009 – At the studios of Cleanskies TV, I was interviewed about the costs of climate change, and discussed adaptation efforts underway in the US and around the world.

May 2009 – I helped draft the scenarios for Rising Waters, a multistakeholder scenarios effort focused on climate change adaptation in the Hudson Valley. The final report is now completed and available here.

May 2008 – I reviewed two books on climate and energy in the New Leader magazine: James Gustave Speth's The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, plus Robert Bryce's Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence.

January 2008 – A very local paper covers a very global issue.... The Litchfield County Times in northwestern Connectictut ran an article in January 2008 about Carbon-Based.

Now available: Climate Change Adaptation in 2011

A selection of my writings from 2011, plus some of my posts, as well as links... all focusing on the risks of climate change